comScore: Android, iOS Increase Mobile Market Share

The latest data from market research firm comScore underscores the old adage 'The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.' In terms of mobile market share, Google and Apple are the two fat cats living high on the hog, while Microsoft, Research In Motion, and Symbian fight over the leftover scraps, and there were less to go around in January 2012.

According to comScore, Google's Android platform still dominates the smartphone landscape as it inches closer to claiming half of all mobile subscribers living in the U.S. Android's market share jumped from 46.3 percent in October 2011 to 48.6 percent in January 2012, while Apple's iOS platform moved forward 1.4 percentage points to 29.5 percent during the same period.

The remaining three major players each lost market share with RIM taking the biggest hit, dropping from 17.2 percent to 15.2 percent, which is still well in front of the bottom three. Microsoft's share dropped a single percentage point to 4.4 percent in January 2012, and Symbian slid to 1.5 percent, down a tenth of a percentage point, according to comScore's data.

An interesting side note to all this is that smartphone users are starting to get the hang of their devices. comScore breaks down mobile content usage by category -- sending text messages, using downloaded apps, using the browser, accessing social networking sites or blogs, playing games, and listening to music -- and in each case, the percentage of mobile subscribers in the U.S. engaging in the activity went up by at least 2.8 percentage points.